'Lego Movie' a deliciously droll celebration of individuality

"The Lego Movie" PG — Kids 6 and older will have a blast at this animated 3-D comic adventure set in a LEGO universe.

Parents will grin at its dead-on spoof of modern life (i.e., $37 for barista coffee).

The message is: "Embrace what is special about you."

That's not a new theme in kids' flicks, but this film's approach is fresh and funny.

LEGO man Emmet (voice of Chris Pratt) eventually learns to embrace his specialness, but when we meet him he's a worker at a construction site in the LEGO world.

He sings "Everything is Awesome" and has no thoughts of his own — unless they're in the rule book. His life turns upside down when he accidentally falls down a deep hole and encounters a glowing monolith.

When he re-emerges with a red LEGO brick, The Piece of Resistance, melded to his back, Emmet is identified as The Special, destined to become "the brightest, most talented, most interesting person in the universe" and to lead an uprising against the autocratic President Business (Will Ferrell). Business has secret plans to destroy the LEGO universe because he can't abide the Master Builders who keep changing the shape of things.

Resistance fighter Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), the hair-tossing girl of Emmet's dreams, urges Emmet to think outside the box, but he doesn't know how at first.

After the climactic battle (which looks comically like a 1980s video game), the film takes a "real" turn to send home its message about kids and parents embracing creativity.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Bad Cop threatens to melt Emmet down, and President Business threatens to put his constituents "to sleep" if they don't obey.

Later battles against President Business and his minions look like old video games, but include LEGO characters that morph like Transformers.

"The Monuments Men" PG-13 — It's an open question whether teens — and this film is OK for most teens — will find this lumbering World War II story (which one had hoped would be so much better!) of interest.

If they love history and art, the movie's subject will be tantalizing: how a motley crew of American, British and French museum curators, art historians, artists and architects ventured into Europe after D-Day and risked their lives to recover tens of thousands of works of art looted by the Nazis.

If only George Clooney, who directed, co-wrote and co-starred, had been more successful in making the film click.

It is clearly intended as a salute to World War II films from the 1950s and '60s (i.e., "Stalag 17," 1953; "The Longest Day," 1962; "The Great Escape," 1963; etc.).

The relatively sanitized war scenes, the good-natured banter, and even the martial music in the soundtrack, all show that was the aim.

But the overly earnest script (co-written by Grant Heslov) is weighted down with lengthy factoids, as if Clooney et al. worried that younger audiences would need to be brought up to speed on World War II.

That's probably true, but all that verbal exposition and the dizzying way the narrative skips around time and place are momentum killers. Clooney plays Frank Stokes, a Harvard art historian.

He convinces President Roosevelt to put him in uniform and let him recruit other experts to save European art.

Co-stars Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville and Jean Dujardin play members of the team. They start by trying to save individual altarpieces and sculptures at churches, and ultimately uncover huge caches of stolen art by the likes of Michelangelo, Raphael and Vermeer hidden in salt and copper mines.

Damon's character tries to get a Paris curator (Cate Blanchett), afraid the Americans will keep the art for themselves, to pass along her knowledge of what art was taken where.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Small scenes of war violence — bombings, gunfire — are not graphically depicted. Two characters are fatally shot and we see blood, but no explicit wounds. Characters smoke constantly and use occasional mild profanity and the ethnic slur "Kraut." The dialogue includes brief, non-descriptive references to concentration camps. In one of the caves containing stolen art, the men discover barrels full of gold fillings, implicitly taken from murdered Jews in the camps. Scenes of German prisoners of war behind barbed wire are grim.